[125] A mole on the fair face of Beauty is not regarded as a blemish, but the very contrary, by Asiatics--or by Europeans either, else why did the ladies of the last century patch their faces, if not (originally) to set off the clearness of their complexion by contrast with the little black wafer?--though (afterwards) often to hide a pimple! Eastern poets are for ever raving over the mole on a pretty face. Hafiz goes the length of declaring: "For the mole on the cheek of that girl of Shiraz I would give away Samarkand and Bukhara"-- albeit they were none of his to give to anybody. [126] Cf. Shelley, in the fine opening of that wonderful poetical offspring of his adolescence, _Queen Mab_: "Hath, then, the gloomy Power Whose reign is in the tainted sepulchres Seized on her sinless soul?" * * * * * "This," methinks I hear some misogynist exclaim, after reading it--"this is rank nonsense--it is stark lunacy!" And so it is, perhaps. At all events, these impassioned words are supposed to be uttered by a poor youth who had gone mad from love. Our misogynist--and may I venture to include the experienced married man?--will probably retort, that all love between young folks is not only folly but sheer madness; and he will be the more confirmed in this opinion when he learns that, according to certain grave Persian writers, Layla was really of a swarthy visage, and far from being the beauty her infatuated lover conceived her to be: thus verifying the dictum of our great dramatist, in the ever-fresh passage where he makes "the lunatic, the lover, and the poet" to be "of imagination all compact," the lover seeing "Helen's beauty in the brow of Egypt!"--Notwithstanding all this, the ancient legend of Layla and Majnun has proved an inspiring theme to more than one great poet of Persia, during the most flourishing period of the literature of that country--for which let us all be duly thankful. _ADDITIONAL NOTES._ 'WAMIK AND ASRA,' p. 289.